Saint-Surrealism

Abstract In 1947, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and other surrealist artists depicted the Temptations of St. Anthony for an international art competition in the wake of a Hollywood film production. In this way, the traditional iconography of the Saint was absorbed by surrealism and transformed into a symbol of post-war trauma. The article examines the historical, cinematic, and intellectual context of this event, focusing in particular on the contribution of Max Ernst. The analysis of Ernst’s painting will show how the artist—as well as his competitors—adopted a Christian legend for his avant-gardist poetics of chance and desire. A key concept of this reading will be the idea of the “temptation by space”, developed by the philosopher Roger Caillois—and already present in Gustave Flaubert’s literary account of the Saint. Adopting this idea and applying it to the technique of decalcomania, Ernst interpreted the temptations of the Saint as a pictorial inversion of the relation of figure and ground: Anthony appears to disappear on the canvas.